Abstract

Predictive processing framework (PP) has found wide applications in cognitive science and philosophy. It is an attractive candidate for a unified account of the mind in which perception, action, and cognition fit together in a single model. However, PP cannot claim this role if it fails to accommodate an essential part of cognition—conceptual thought. Recently, Williams (Synthese 1–27, 2018) argued that PP struggles to address at least two of thought’s core properties—generality and rich compositionality. In this paper, I show that neither necessarily presents a problem for PP. In particular, I argue that because we do not have access to cognitive processes but only to their conscious manifestations, compositionality may be a manifest property of thought, rather than a feature of the thinking process, and result from the interplay of thinking and language. Pace Williams, both of these capacities, constituting parts of a complex and multifarious cognitive system, may be fully based on the architectural principles of PP. Under the assumption that language presents a subsystem separate from conceptual thought, I sketch out one possible way for PP to accommodate both generality and rich compositionality.

Highlights

  • The predictive processing framework1 successfully accounts for a wide variety of B Sofiia Rappe0123456789().: V,volSynthese (2022) 200:0 perceptual and cognitive processes in multiple domains

  • Vision (Hohwy et al, 2008), body-awareness (Palmer et al, 2015), language and communication (Friston & Frith, 2015; Rappe, 2019), emotion (Miller & Clark, 2018; Seth, 2013; Velasco & Loev, 2020), and psychiatric disorders2 have all received explanations that appeal to the basic Predictive processing framework (PP) architectural principles such as hierarchical generative models, long term prediction error minimization, and precision weightings

  • There are other reasons to object to the unifying power of PP, but conceptual thought presents one of the biggest challenges: If it cannot be explained as a predictive process, PP cannot pretend to provide an exhaustive account of the mind (Seth, 2015), certainly not for philosophers

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Summary

Introduction

The predictive processing framework (or PP for short, see Clark, 2013; Hohwy, 2013; Friston, 2005; Rao & Ballard, 1999) successfully accounts for a wide variety of

B Sofiia Rappe
Cutting in the thinking bundle
Thinking processes do not require procedural compositionality
The generality problem
Concepts are meaningfully located at a specific region of a hierarchy
Concepts are dynamic representations
PP-based proposal of how conceptual thought and language interact
Surface compositionality and implications of the approach
Conclusions

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